The new additions are Beijing-based China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI), Spain's Supercomputing Center of Galicia (CESGA by its Spanish acronym), Georgia Tech's Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) and China Telecom, the founding vendors announced Monday.

Open Cirrus, launched in 2008, is described as a "test bed" on multiple data centers and sites whose goal is to boost research and development of cloud computing technology, like large-scale Web-hosted applications and IT infrastructure.

The three computer industry giants were motivated at the time by a belief that cloud computing progress had been slowed down by financial and logistical obstacles, and that Open Cirrus could promote collaboration among vendors, universities and governments.

Spain's CESGA will focus on what is needed for offering high performance computing on the cloud, while Georgia Tech's CERCS will take on cloud platforms' energy efficiency and systems management technology. China Telecom and CMRI will zero in on mobile.

Other existing partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Russian Academy of Sciences, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea, Carnegie Mellon University, and Malaysia's MIMOS.

The announcement was made at the Open Cirrus Summit, which Carnegie Mellon and Intel Labs are hosting.

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